So when Rae issues the kind of warning he delivered in the Toronto Star over the long weekend — “…there are certain fundamental principles of politics that are being dishonoured every day — the first is the rule of law, the second is the importance of social solidarity, the third is prudence, by which I mean not simply caution, but constantly assessing the consequences of our actions …” — it’s worth noting. Especially since he’s speaking of the 45th president of the United States.

There is a growing sense that, following the public circus of the past two weeks — the senior staffing meltdown in the White House, the failure of the Obamacare repeal, Donald Trump’s public tantrums directed at his own attorney general and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the appointment of generals to try to manage Trump (though that is surely not how he sees it) — an already highly polarized American polity may be getting close to its breaking point.

Trump’s fitness for office is now increasingly being challenged by the Fourth Estate he routinely describes as “the enemies of the people.”

“[Trump] takes the very thing that he is doing — in this case, demeaning the Constitution — and flings that accusation back at his opponent,” writes Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post. “Trump’s campaign and now his presidency have been an unceasing effort to demean the Constitution. From ‘fake news’ to ‘so-called’ judges, from his ill-considered travel ban to encouraging police officers’ roughing up of suspects, Trump is a one-man assault on the rule of law.

“Some readers have asked a fair and important question: Why is nearly every column of mine about Trump? The answer is: Trump. His behavior is so extreme and so dangerous that to respond only episodically and occasionally is to risk allowing it to appear acceptable. Outrageous words and outrageous actions require expressions of outrage in return, each and every time. That will continue until the danger subsides.”

Marcus evokes the words of Martin Niemoller, the German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. You know them. Chances are you’ve read them elsewhere recently:

First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me … and there was no one left to speak for me.

As a cry of remorse, it is powerful. As a call to action, it has problems. We will return to Niemoller.

On the other side of the virtual barbed wire is a recent video ad by the NRA threatening to “come for” the New York Times. An NRA spokesmen insisted it was not a threat. There is also an increasing number of instances — so far, isolated — of pro-Trump online players ‘doxxing’ his political enemies, i.e., telling the online world where they live, or threatening to.

These tactics are part of an age-old propaganda technique sometimes referred to as “stochastic incitement” — or, if you haven’t got an Oxford Concise handy, “incitement by indirect means.” The outstanding example is Trump’s August 2016 statement to an election rally in Wilmington, S.C.:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets the pick … if she gets the pick of her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno.”

Of course, he never called for her assassination. Never said that. If some jerk took something literally, it’s nothing to do with him. King Henry II had the good grace to accept moral responsibility when some jerk took his Will-no-one-rid-me-of-this-turbulent-priest outburst literally back in 1170. Trump isn’t Henry II.

The amplification of vitriol is becoming frightening. Does this spill uncontrollably off social media and into the streets? If that threat is real, how can it be prevented? Can Trump and his disrespect for the rule of law be contained? If so, how?

There are plenty of people online making noise about extreme action against Trump — and there are characters in the White House who might happily incite it. But it hasn’t happened yet, and spouting hate online is a long way from taking to the streets — as the protestors in Tehran in 2009 and Cairo in 2011 found to their cost.

In this context, and again referencing Niemoller, one of the words that is starting to recur in social media is ‘Nazi’ — not as an epithet but as historical analogy.

Around January 30, I opened William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for the first time in about 50 years. It came out in 1961 and it’s still the best non-academic summary of how the Nazis took power and what they did with it.

You can take some comfort from the fact that any direct analogy between Trump now and Hitler then doesn’t wash. The thing that stands out immediately is that after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler understood that he was going to have to work very long and hard to take power. He also understood that he would have to either neutralize or co-opt the police and armed forces.

He did both. When he came to power in 1933 he did so with a very solid organization behind him. When he consolidated power through an internal coup against his own SA leadership in June 1934, he did so by cajoling the Army into a deal with the devil — to stand aside and let Himmler, Heydrich and the SS handle it. They stood aside, and paid dearly.

Well before 1933, the Nazis had also normalized an appalling degree of street violence. When they did take over, any reduction in that violence seemed like a relief; Hitler could pretend to be doing everyone a favour by suppressing the SA. He came to power with the instruments of repression already prepared.

That was textbook revolution. What’s happening with Trump is practically the reverse. Trump was utterly unprepared for victory. He entered power with no tools, of repression or anything else — only the rotted hulk of a two-party system that enabled him to occupy the vacuum it left behind in public life.

The Nazi leadership was famously dysfunctional but it wasn’t a patch on this White House crowd. Those who remained in 1945, with the exception of Speer and the top generals, had fought their way to power with Hitler since the 1920s. They may have squabbled in private, but Hitler had the Gestapo. Trump has Twitter.

Trump has very few hard levers to pull, beyond his innate personal power to bully, confuse and incite. That may actually see him back into power in 2020, given the current incapacity of the political system. At this point, the discussion is focused on whether he can be driven out of office before then — or before he starts something catastrophic at home or abroad.

There are three — and only three — legal ways to remove a sitting president: resignation, impeachment and invocation of the 25th Amendment, the clause that allows for the ejection of a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Ross Douthat of the New York Times began calling for the deployment of the 25th Amendment in May of this year.

All other ways of removing a sitting president are illegal and unconstitutional, and run a very serious risk of triggering civil violence. No one in the responsible mainstream media, and no responsible voice on social media, has called for any actions beyond those three means of removal. The very suggestion could be construed as incitement to rebellion.

That hasn’t stopped the alt-right from beating this drum, of course. Fox News host Jeanine Pirro predicted that any indictment of the president or a member of his family would cause “a real uprising” in the United States. Other, more extreme sentiments abound online.

Political rhetoric in the U.S. has been overheated for far too many years, but the elephant in the room is becoming impossible to ignore. When you say, ‘The president is unfit for office’, and you also suspect strongly that none of the three legal variants is likely to succeed, certain other conclusions might spring to mind. Local hard-right militias have started ostentatiously displaying firearms at liberal rallies. This may get worse before it gets better.

Which brings us back to Martin Niemoller. Hindsight is untrustworthy as a guide to future action. Leaving aside the human instinct for avoidance and denial, history is not a predictive algorithm — even when everyone agrees on the facts, which never happens. We are not privileged to say with certainty that something will happen until it has happened.

There might be a ‘Reichstag fire’, or there might not. Trump might start a war to get his poll numbers up, or he might not. He might be content with another token cruise missile strike. As for the other side, there are plenty of people online making noise about extreme action against Trump — and there are characters in the White House who might happily incite it. But it hasn’t happened yet, and spouting extreme views online is a long way from taking to the streets — as the protestors in Tehran in 2009 and Cairo in 2011 found to their cost.

If you decide to take up a gun for MAGA, even with a militia, you might start a major riot — but you have no chance of winning because you have no goal, no organization and no strategy, and your chances of getting suppressed by your own side when you become inconvenient are very high.

If you’re a U.S. general, and you’ve taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, you may find yourself having to decide whether that oath requires unquestioning obedience to a presidential order, and at what point defiance beyond a letter of resignation might be justified. Should you decide that it is justified, you have to know that there will be other generals who believe otherwise — and are prepared to enforce their position. This isn’t 1861; in American there are no alternative places to put your loyalty. If a river is crossed, it will be more Rubicon than Potomac.

Of course, the vitriol with North Korea has been going on for nearly 70 years and the world hasn’t ended. As long as the domestic vitriol remains mainly virtual, it’s relatively harmless.

But the pressure in the virtual containment vessel is rising — and most cataclysmic events do become clear only in hindsight.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.